National Guard troops are headed to Chicago and could arrive as soon as Tuesday after a federal judge on Monday scheduled a hearing on the matter for Thursday in order to review what she said was more than 500 pages of filings.
The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago sued the Trump administration Monday over the Guard deployment, which would send up to 300 Illinois National Guard soldiers and up to 400 more Guard troops from Texas into Chicago ostensibly to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and facilities, but over the objection of the governor of Illinois. “These advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous,” the suit alleges.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at night,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said at a press conference Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”
After a judge paused Guard deployments to Oregon on Sunday, Trump said Monday he’s open to invoking the Insurrection Act, which would authorize the U.S. military to assist civilian state or federal authorities, including police, to put down an insurrection. The act has been invoked just 30 times in the past 230 years; the last time was in 1992 during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. “I’d do it if it was necessary,” Trump said Monday. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors, or mayors were holding us up.”
Trump: Chicago is “like a war zone,” the president claimed Monday. (He’s made similar claims about Portland, Ore., though the judge hearing the matter on Sunday did not agree, and described the president’s characterization as “simply untethered to the facts.”) “You can go to Afghanistan, you can go to a lot of different places, and they probably marvel at how much crime we have,” Trump said of Chicago on Monday.
Pritzker: “There is no invasion here. There is no insurrection here,” he said Monday. “The folks in the neighborhoods do not want armed troops marching in their streets,” the governor said.
Critical reax: Trump’s use of an obscure statute (10 U.S. Code § 12406) to deploy troops over governors’ objections is “unprecedented,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project. That law permits a Guard authorization if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the U.S. government.
“I think we’ve all got to be very, very, very concerned about armed federal agents and troops reporting to the president exercising claims of police power in this country,” Shamsi said, and cited the ruling Sunday from Judge Immergut. “We’re only in the first year of this presidency,” and already—as Immergut pointed out Sunday—Trump tried “circumventing a court decision that reasoned that there was no justification” for National Guard troops in Portland.
Local reax: In addition to Tuesday’s military-style immigration raid on an apartment complex, “We are also seeing masked, heavily armed federal law enforcement officers, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection, marching through downtown Chicago heavily armed, in camouflage, and in masks threatening people and questioning others who are simply doing nothing more than visiting Millennium Park with their family on a Sunday afternoon,” said Colleen Connell, executive director the ACLU in Illinois. “We also tragically saw ICE agents shoot and kill one person at a traffic stop in Franklin Park, a near-in suburb, and misrepresented what happened at that scene.”
“I want to be very, very clear that sending heavily armed federal agents and now National Guard troops from potentially thousands of miles away into our beautiful city of Chicago is unnecessary, it’s inflammatory, and it puts public safety and human beings at risk,” Connell said Monday.
Meanwhile, “The federal deployment of 300 National Guard troops in California has been quietly extended through January 2026,” the New York Times reported Monday, citing court documents filed this weekend in Oregon.
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2001, the U.S. military’s invasion of Afghanistan began.
Trump delivered another overtly partisan speech to the military on Sunday, this time to sailors aboard the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Norfolk, Va., and less than a week since his wandering remarks to generals and admirals during an unprecedented meeting last Monday in Quantico.
“Now we’re in Memphis,” Trump said. “And we are going to Chicago,” he told the sailors. “We send in the National Guard…We send in whatever is necessary. People don’t care. They don’t want crime in their cities.” Trump also mocked his predecessor for falling down steps, and declared, “We’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand.”
“And I want you to know that despite the current Democrat-induced shutdown, we will get our service members every last penny,” the president said. “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Do not worry about it. It’s all coming. It’s coming. And even more, because I’m supporting the across-the-board pay raises for every sailor and service member.”
Shutdown trivia: U.S. service members could miss their first paycheck of the shutdown if negotiations drag beyond Oct. 15.
“But we have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” the president told members of the Navy. “They want to give all of our money to illegal aliens that pour into the country,” he said Sunday—less than three days after calling Democrats “The Party Of Hate, Evil, And Satan” amid Republican lawmakers and pundits blaming violence in the country on dangerous rhetoric from the left side of the political spectrum.
War on drug boats
Update: The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has argued in a classified memo “that the president is allowed to authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans,” CNN reported Monday. However, “At the Pentagon, some military lawyers, including international law experts within [DoD’s Office of General Counsel], have raised concerns about the legality of the lethal strikes on suspected drug traffickers,” with multiple current and former JAGs telling CNN “the strikes do not appear lawful.”
ICYMI: The White House last week told lawmakers they believe the country is in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, and that’s why they feel U.S. troops can kill people in speedboats instead of interdicting and arresting those inside the vessels traveling around the Caribbean Sea, north of Venezuela.
New: The New York City Bar Association called the Pentagon’s attacks on boats in Latin America “illegal summary execution” that are “prohibited by both U.S. and international law,” which is to say those military actions are akin to “murders,” the organization said in a statement Monday.
The group also asked “Congress to remind the President that he lacks authority to continue to misuse our military forces for similar unlawful attacks on foreign vessels and their civilian crews and that continuation of such attacks is unlawful.”
For your ears only: Just Security recently posted a new podcast discussion about Trump’s lethal strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 21 people so far. The guests “examine an important new chapter in the use of force against drug cartels” in a discussion that “explores how far presidential powers extend in such contexts.” Listen, here.
Extra reading:
Around the Defense Department
OK for F/A-XX? Sources tell Reuters that SecDef Hegseth has approved the Navy’s effort to build a sixth-gen fighter of its own, clearing the way to choose between options offered by Boeing and Northrop Grumman after years of delay.
Background, from August: “In March, the Navy was reportedly close to picking a company to build F/A-XX, but an announcement never came, and the service ended up gutting funding for the aircraft in its 2026 budget request, throwing the program into limbo,” Defense One wrote. “But Congress is on track to reverse those cuts: Senate appropriators added $1.4 billion to F/A-XX in their draft defense spending bill and House appropriators added $972 million to their version. Cheever’s comments today appear to confirm that F/A-XX is in fact moving ahead.”
Industry had more than 1,500 questions for the Missile Defense Agency about the gigantic $151-billion, 10-year contract vehicle for work on the ambitious Golden Dome missile-defense project, so officials have pushed the deadline for pitches for slices of the work one week to Oct. 16, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.
The Army established Transformation and Training Command on Thursday, combining missions and assets from the now-deactivated Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command. The merger is part of the service’s Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) effort announced by Hegseth in May. Breaking Defense has more, here.
Additional reading: “Marines retire ‘workhorse’ Assault Amphibious Vehicle after 50 years,” Military Times reported Monday.
Read the full article here
